Converged Systems, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Converged infrastructures provide enterprises with an opportunity to be more flexible and cost effective in supporting the disaster recovery and business continuity needs of remote and branch offices (ROBOs). They also provide a unique way for small businesses to leverage highly virtualized infrastructures to similarly improve availability and mitigate the potential impact of natural disasters or man-made threats such as cyberattacks.

A converged infrastructure system combines compute, storage, networking and unified management in an integrated, pre-certified solution. Converged infrastructures typically incorporate virtualization capabilities across compute, storage and network resources, giving IT teams the opportunity to automate and orchestrate a wide range of management tasks, including initial deployments, ongoing operations and scaling.

The use of virtualization, automation and orchestration makes it much easier and more cost efficient for organizations with smaller IT staffs—such as small businesses and ROBOs—to leverage the benefits of a modern data center infrastructure for disaster recovery and business continuity without placing an undue burden on precious IT resources. It also gives them the opportunity to take advantage of cloud-based resources—private, public or hybrid—as an important component of their disaster recovery and business continuity practices.

In today’s environment, where organizations are under ongoing pressure to ensure 24/7 availability of applications and data, disaster recovery and business continuity are more important than ever. According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach is now approximately $4 million.1

In some industries, such as healthcare, organizations are required to develop an IT disaster recovery plan to ensure data protection and availability. Government and other public-sector organizations also need IT disaster recovery plans to serve their constituents, and companies in retail, manufacturing, software as a service and others must avoid downtime because it can dramatically impact revenues and customer goodwill.

In developing disaster recovery solutions, converged infrastructures are a great fit for small businesses and ROBOs given their simplicity and use of modern technologies that incorporate functions such as virtualization, automation and orchestration. Using an integrated converged infrastructure solution for disaster recovery and business continuity allows IT teams that support small businesses and ROBOs to achieve the following:

Accelerate the establishment of a remote data center or the modernization of an existing local data center. With a converged system, the IT team typically has only one purchase order and can deploy a remote data center in a fraction of the time it would take if each component were separately purchased and integrated. Once the data center is up and running, ongoing management is simpler because of unified automation and orchestration capabilities. If the remote site or small business grows and needs more resources, it is simple to just add another converged system, rather than having to upgrade each individual component.

Minimize the uncertainties and risks involved in creating and implementing an IT disaster recovery plan. Developing and testing a disaster recovery plan can be an arduous process for IT teams. While disaster recovery is vitally important and business-critical to an organization’s health and success, it is not necessarily a strategic or innovative endeavor. If IT departments can simplify the process and reduce risk, they can shift personnel to revenue-generating activities. Certain pre-integrated solutions, such as those from Dell EMC, support specific disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities that reduce risk and simplify IT. For example, some solutions are capable of automatically backing up data to a remote site, including bandwidth-saving deduplicated daily backups or continuous remote replication for any-point-in-time data recovery.

Leverage a hyperconverged infrastructure to simplify deployments and maximize data protection and recovery. By using a turnkey hyperconverged infrastructure appliance, IT teams can dramatically simplify deployments while also leveraging built-in backup, recovery and continuous data protection capabilities. For example, Dell EMC data protection for VxRail provides small businesses and ROBOs with backup and recovery, continuous data protection for any-point-in-time recovery, proactive monitoring and analysis, reporting, and backup file search capabilities. Another important advantage of this model: IT teams can perform automated restore rehearsals to validate disaster recovery readiness without impacting production environments. IT teams also have the option of deploying the solution locally or from a central data center.

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Conclusion In today’s environment, small businesses and enterprise IT teams supporting ROBOs can’t afford downtime and must ensure they can still deliver IT services and perform essential functions in the event of a disaster. IT teams can simplify disaster recovery and business continuity with converged and hyperconverged solutions that are ready-built to support disaster recovery. These solutions use modern data center technologies that leverage virtualization, automation and orchestration. For IT leaders and others concerned about disaster recovery and business continuity, now is the time to find out what convergence can do for your organization.